How It Reached London, and What It Is Worth

Cyril Lucaris had been patriarch of Alexandria before he was patriarch of Constantinople, and he brought the codex with him. He offered it to James I of England through the ambassador Thomas Roe; James died before it arrived, and it was presented instead to Charles I in 1627. It passed with the Royal Library to the nation in the eighteenth century, went to the British Museum at its foundation, and is now in the British Library.

The date of arrival is worth pausing on. The Authorised Version had been published in 1611, so the translators never saw it. A manuscript that would have been among the most important witnesses available to them reached England sixteen years too late to affect a translation that shaped the English language.

Its value to textual criticism is peculiar and instructive. In the Gospels its text is broadly Byzantine, the tradition behind the later medieval majority of manuscripts and the earliest such witness of that quality. In Acts, the Epistles and Revelation it is Alexandrian, agreeing with the older tradition behind most modern critical editions. One book, copied by a small number of scribes, therefore carries two different text types in different parts, which is a standing reminder that a manuscript is a collection of exemplars rather than a single artefact of one tradition. For the Septuagint it is a primary witness throughout.